The Winter Widow Read online

  “Oh my dear Lord,” Sophie said slowly.

  Susan couldn’t tell if that meant Sophie flatly rejected the possibility or if it hadn’t occurred to her before and she was thinking it over.

  “Well, there now.” Sophie shook her head. “I can’t make sense of this killing. I’ll just have to find out.” She shook her head again. “I just wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  Another shake of Sophie’s head.

  Susan had had enough of Sophie. If she knew something, she wasn’t going to spill it; if she’d killed Daniel, she wasn’t going to admit it. Susan needed to know more before she tackled Sophie again. “Do you own a rifle?”

  “Oh, yes. It belonged to Ed.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Hump.” Sophie put her hands flat on the table and pushed herself up.

  Susan followed her to a hallway off the kitchen.

  “In here.” Sophie yanked open a closet door and stood peering in. “Should be, anyway.” She rummaged through clothing and boxes and old boots. “Ah.” She emerged carrying the rifle and held it out.

  Susan thought of fingerprints. “Set it down, please.”

  Sophie’s blue eyes held a gleam of malice as she placed it butt down with the barrel resting against the door frame.

  Susan crouched on her heels and clamped down hard on her back teeth. Blood pounded in her ears. Images flashed through her mind: of hands raising the rifle, stock pressed against a shoulder, sighting down the barrel, zeroing in on Daniel’s spine. Finger curling around the trigger, tightening—

  “Hasn’t been used in a dozen years or more,” Sophie said. The telephone rang and she clomped off to the kitchen.

  Susan sucked in a breath and clenched her hands, concentrating on pushing down the roar of sound in her head. She stared objectively at the rifle. It might not have been fired recently, but it had certainly been cleaned. It smelled strongly of oil, the stock was polished, and the inside of the barrel was free of dust or spiderwebs.

  “For you,” Sophie said.

  Susan looked up.

  “Phone.”

  She went to the kitchen and picked up the receiver lying on the counter.

  “Ben Parkhurst.”

  She lowered her voice. “Sophie has a rifle.”

  Silence. “Everybody has a rifle.”

  “Well, have you fired any and made comparison tests?”

  Another pause. “Can you show cause? Even here people have rights. When you can tear yourself away from Sophie, you might want to come out to Guthman’s.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  AFTER getting directions from Sophie, Susan headed the pickup north under a vast blue sky. Summoned, by God. And with a great deal of that damn patronizing arrogance. She took a breath. Watch yourself. The point here is not one-upmanship but getting cooperation toward a common goal. Guthman’s had been her next scheduled stop, anyway. Maybe, maybe Parkhurst had something.

  The sky seemed huge and endless, stretching forever above the small hills. An eerie feeling of unreality stole over her, a frightening sense of having slipped through some doorway into another world.

  God damn you, Daniel Wren, why did you do this to me?

  Her life with him seemed long ago, a dream she groped to recapture, managing only niggling irritation because she couldn’t quite remember. Angrily, she tried to grasp a moment, any moment, when they were together, but her mind found only shadowy images and she saw two strangers. Even the female figure didn’t have any connection to herself. In a panic, she realized she couldn’t remember what Daniel looked like.

  She lit a cigarette and became aware of abdominal pains and the furry tickle of nausea. Lack of food, too much coffee, too many cigarettes. And all these wide-open spaces. If I’m not careful, I might fall off the end of the world.

  Eleven miles from Sophie’s, she rattled the pickup over the cattle guard onto Guthman’s land. Five days ago, Daniel had driven out in response to a phone call. Last Thursday had been bitterly cold with wind and sleet; today the sun shone, but she was here in response to a phone call. From Parkhurst. Who had made the call to Daniel?

  It was over a mile of curving road with open land and sparse trees on both sides before she reached the sprawling complex of main house, barns, bunkhouses and outbuildings. Otto’s fiefdom, as Daniel had called it, spread out before her, the tangible evidence of Guthman’s power and influence. One building looked like an Old West—type jail, a squat gray rectangle with bars on the windows. Uh-huh. A law unto himself, Mr. Guthman?

  The place had a working flavor of purpose and movement with men going to and from the outbuildings, shouldering large sacks or trundling wheelbarrows. Dogs trotted around intent on their own business. Two riders on horseback clattered toward her and one touched his hat as they went by. She waved and drove up to the front of the main house, a large red brick two-story building, imposing and ugly, with a porch across the entire front.

  As she got out of the pickup, Parkhurst came down the wide steps to meet her. If he said anything about pigs, she was going to kick him in the shins.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Lucille’s missing.”

  “Missing seems rather vague. Care to expand a little?”

  “Probably nothing to it. She hasn’t been seen since last night, bed not slept in, car gone. Mrs. Guthman’s worried.”

  “Mrs.?”

  “See what you can get from her.”

  “You don’t have time to see what you can get from her?”

  “I lack your finesse.”

  “While I’m exercising finesse, what will you be doing?”

  “Otto found a fence cut. I came out with the sheriff to check into it.”

  Ah, Parkhurst was throwing her a bone, giving her something to do, showing how cooperative he was. He probably thought she couldn’t do any harm talking with Mrs. Guthman. “Have cattle actually been stolen?”

  “I intend to find out.”

  I see, she thought, and wondered if he knew Lucille hadn’t showed up for the sign ceremony. She didn’t feel inclined to tell him.

  Inside the house, she followed him along a hallway and into a room obviously belonging to the master of the house. A large wooden desk sat at one end; at the other was a stone fireplace with two burgundy leather chairs in front of it. Pictures of cows covered the walls.

  A man with close-cut gray hair and a lined face stood unobtrusively in a corner beside a file cabinet. Sheriff Holmes, she assumed, since the arm patch on his dark jacket said FREDERICK COUNTY SHERIFF. He looked at her with polite interest.

  Ella Guthman, a plump woman with round cheeks and fading blond hair, wearing a pink flowered dress, was perched on one of the chairs by the fireplace, eyes fixed on her husband.

  Otto Guthman stood with his back to the fireplace, glaring at his wife. About sixty, big-shouldered, broad-chested and bow-legged, he wore finely crafted boots, denim pants and a denim shirt open at the throat.

  “You’ve got to do something,” Ella was saying agitatedly. Her feet in sturdy brown shoes were pressed flat against the floor, as though to keep her from leaping up, and she twisted a handkerchief through short thick fingers.

  “I told you, Lucille is fine. No need for all this fuss. She’s gone off someplace to cause worry.”

  His voice was odd. The words came out equally spaced with equal emphasis on each, as though it hurt his throat to speak. An easy voice to imitate, Susan thought.

  “You’ve got to find her,” Ella said.

  “She’ll call. Stop fussing.” His thick black hair was mottled with gray, his nose bulbous over a wide, narrow-lipped mouth; his powerful arms were long and anthropoid. He was the male beast and this was his turf. He should have been the head of a large dynasty with successive wives and scores of children. Instead he had only one wife and two children. Susan wondered if that was why he’d gone into breeding cattle.

  Parkhurst introduced her. Guthman lowered his chin to his chest and
examined her from under shaggy eyebrows. His look wasn’t deliberately intimidating, but rather some sort of exhaustive inventory he went through and then filed under Wren, Susan. Little girl too young to know anything. From San Francisco—perverts and drug addicts. Wheedled her way into a man’s job. Have a word with the mayor. Let her talk with Ella. Give the womenfolk something to do.

  Susan gazed back unflinchingly, but couldn’t stop her heart from beating faster. That’s power all right. It seemed to emanate from him in invisible waves.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and strode toward the door.

  Parkhurst fell in behind and Sheriff Holmes nodded to Susan before he went after them. She didn’t read any disapproval in his demeanor and wondered if he’d bowed to the times and hired a female deputy or two, then discovered, to his surprise, that they were quite competent.

  Walking the length of the room, she sat in the chair next to Ella and felt herself sinking deep into burgundy leather. Ella sat rigid, staring at the door through which her husband had gone, her blue-green eyes sharp with anger.

  “Tell me about Lucille,” Susan said.

  “She’s been gone for hours.” Ella turned her gaze on Susan, then looked down at her hands and plucked at a mangled handkerchief.

  “When did she leave?”

  “She didn’t sleep here last night. I didn’t know, not till Martha told me. This afternoon! So much time.”

  “Martha?”

  “She thought I knew. That Lucille had planned a trip or—” Ella’s voice caught and she bit her lip.

  “Who is Martha?”

  “Martha, my housekeeper. Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “When did you last see Lucille?”

  “When I went to bed. I don’t know. Ten-thirty. It must have been ten-thirty.”

  “Mrs. Guthman, your husband doesn’t seem very worried.”

  Ella stared at her. “Dan was shot here, and now Lucille is missing. Something’s happened. I know it.”

  “Do you have any specific reason for thinking that?”

  “Lucille wouldn’t just go off.”

  “Can you think of any place she might be?”

  Ella’s shoulders slumped forward and she huddled in on herself. “I don’t know,” she said dully.

  Susan waited.

  “I think,” Ella went on after a moment, “maybe they—Lucille and Otto—had a—an argument.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked at Susan and shook her head. “He doesn’t tell me, he never tells me. Sometimes—” She shook her head again. “Sometimes they argue.”

  When Ella didn’t say anything further, Susan asked, “Does Lucille like her job?”

  “Yes, of course she does.”

  “It’s important to her?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s proud to be on the paper. She writes stories and reports the news and all the activities. People need to know what’s going on and they like to read about their neighbors. Weddings and christenings and about themselves.”

  Ella spoke with a forced enthusiasm, as though she’d been challenged to prove Lucille’s commitment to her job. Susan wondered why. “And Mr. Guthman was proud of Lucille? He approved of the job?”

  Ella raised her chin. “Of course,” she said with too much conviction and then resided back into her huddle. “He didn’t always understand what it meant to her, her job. She’s twenty-five, you know. He thought it was time she got married and settled down. Fathers are—” She twisted the handkerchief.

  Uh-huh. Susan could see that Lucille and her father certainly might argue. “Did she take anything with her? Clothing, a suitcase?”

  Ella looked startled. “I don’t know. I never thought— I’ll go and look.”

  They went up a stairway and into a corner room with windows on two sides. Ruffled curtains hung over the windows; the four-poster bed had a flouncy lavender-flowered bedspread of the same print. Dolls, small stuffed animals and trinkets sat on chests and bookshelves. In the corner between the two windows stood a desk with a portable typewriter, a fluorescent lamp and a small tape recorder.

  With an air of futility, Ella went methodically through the hanging clothes in the built-in wardrobe, pushing each garment aside as she went to the next. She doesn’t have any faith, Susan thought, in my ability to help; she feels this is a waste of time. “Is anything missing?”

  “Her heavy coat. Other things, skirts and sweaters. I can’t be sure.”

  “Suitcase?”

  “Yes.” Holding aside the hanging garments, Ella pointed at the back of the wardrobe where two matching suitcases sat with an empty space for a third.

  “Excuse me,” she said in a tight voice, eyes blurry with tears, and darted from the room, apparently not wanting to cry in front of a stranger. Susan went to the tape recorder and found a cassette in place. She pushed the eject button and took it out. Someone, presumably Lucille, had written January on it.

  After replacing it, she pushed rewind and then play. She heard Lucille’s voice, faint, rewound again and turned up the volume.

  “January thirteenth. One twenty.”

  Her heart skipped a beat. January thirteenth was the day before Daniel had been killed.

  “January sixteenth. Two ten. Random schedule. Makes it almost impossible.” Then nothing.

  “Damn,” Susan muttered, rewound and played the tape again, copied the two brief comments in her notebook, then pushed fast forward. She removed the tape and played the other side. It was totally blank.

  Seated at the desk, she slid open the center drawer. Jumble of odds and ends: pens, rubber bands, scraps of paper, four small metal containers that had originally held cough drops. One now held paper clips; another, six or eight colorless plastic pellets; the third, cough drops; and the fourth was empty. The other drawers had office supplies: paper, envelopes, typewriter ribbons and carbons.

  She examined the clothing in the wardrobe, sticking her hand in pockets and the toes of shoes without finding anything. The drawers of the chest produced sweaters, pajamas, scarves, underwear. In the bottom drawer, she came across a small stack of canceled checks held together by a rubber band and wrapped in a yellow scarf.

  Removing the rubber band, she ran through the checks, all made out to “cash” in amounts of twenty, twenty-five or fifty dollars. The first was dated five years ago and there was one for each of the eighteen following months. A folded sheet of lined paper listed the amounts, and the figures were totaled at the bottom: $500, with an exclamation point. Beneath was written, “Now it’s over.”

  What’s this all about? A flavor of penance hung over the little pile of checks, something secretive and sad hidden away beneath the underwear, something Lucille felt she had to pay for. Whatever it was had happened five years ago. For no reason Susan could think of, she copied the amounts, then snapped the rubber band around the stack and stuck it back in the drawer.

  Nothing here told her where Lucille went or why she’d gone. Susan trotted down the stairs and, when she didn’t see Ella in the living room, went back along the hallway to Guthman’s office, thinking Ella might be waiting there.

  Ella wasn’t, but a man sat at Guthman’s desk, speaking on the phone. From his resemblance to Otto, Susan assumed he must be son Jack. Jack didn’t seem quite comfortable in his father’s chair. She knew almost nothing about him except he taught chemistry at Emerson College. She could guess, though, that at least half his female students were in love with him. Attractive, early thirties, dark curly hair and a moustache, very professorial in a tweed jacket, white shirt and tie. He also looked very worried, nerves stretched tight.

  He hung up the phone and leaned back with a heavy sigh, then noticed her and started.

  “Susan Wren,” she said.

  He rose. “Jack Guthman,” he said in a pleasant baritone and extended his hand. He was almost as tall as his father, but much less massive, and had none of the force of Otto’s personality, that impact of power and presence that made e
veryone sit up and stiffen their spines in self-protection.

  “I thought I might find your mother here.”

  “She’s lying down. Shall I get her?”

  “Not necessary. I suppose you know about Lucille?”

  He nodded. “Mother called.”

  “Have you any idea where she is?”

  Something she couldn’t interpret flickered in his eyes, sensitive blue-green eyes like his mother’s. He shook his head.

  “When did you last see her?”

  He thought a moment. “Sunday evening.”

  Daniel’s funeral had been Sunday afternoon. “Where did you see her?”

  “Here. I came for supper.”

  “You don’t live here?”

  “No,” he said. “I live near campus.”

  “What happened Sunday evening?”

  “Nothing really. Ordinary family meal. The usual conversation, the cattle business, my research, the weather.” He paused. “And, of course, we talked about Dan.”

  “And Lucille? How did she seem? Was there something on her mind? Was she preoccupied?”

  “Well—” He slid a hand in his pocket and she could see his fingers form a fist. “She was kind of quiet and certainly upset about Dan’s murder. Everybody is. We’re sorry—”

  She nodded briskly, still unable to handle expressions of sympathy. They oozed under her defenses and threatened the whole shaky façade. “Your mother thinks Lucille had an argument with your father.”

  “A fight with Dad? So that’s what happened.” Worry seemed to drain away like an outgoing tide, smoothing the lines from his face. “She was always like that. As a kid, whenever he yelled at her, she’d go and hide.”

  Ah, father-daughter conflicts. Susan’s way had been to stand and fight. Apparently, Lucille’s was to withdraw, and maybe bind up her wounds with righteous indignation. “Where would she go?”

  Jack smiled. “Usually the hayloft.”

  Nice smile, Susan thought. “Would she worry her mother this way?”

  The tension returned, bringing anxiety back to his face, and he shook his head as though to ward it off. “Oh, I’m sorry. Would you like to sit down?” He gestured toward the chairs.